Last week, we learned about new research that suggests humanitarian aid to civilians who have been harmed in civil wars can help reduce some forms of violence in those wars. This week, we’re continuing to look at how our understanding of aid in conflict zones is evolving.

Research on aid and governance in wartime tends to focus on how aid influences state behavior. States are crucial players in any kind of civil war and they tend to document their work in ways that make it easy for academics to study the effects of their decisions. Yet, in civil wars, states are rarely the only entities providing governance. Rebel groups, as part of their effort to supplant state power, frequently take on the work of governing in areas where they can exert some control over the civilian population.

A recent paper by political scientists Allison Carnegie, Kimberly Howe, Adam Lichtenheld, and Dipali Mukhopadhyay examines the question of what happens with rebel governance when development aid enters areas where insurgent groups are trying to provide services. They looked at data from surveys and interviews in 27 communities controlled by various rebel groups in Syria that received varying levels of international aid between 2014 and 2016, to understand whether the arrival of aid into those communities improved civilian perceptions of how rebels governed.

Past studies suggested that international aid would have little, or perhaps even negative, impact on civilian perceptions of rebel governance. Numerous articles have shown little correlation between aid and perceptions of state governance, and many theorists believe that rebel groups who receive outside material support are crueler to civilians because they have no need to call on them for resources. Yet, when they examined the data from Syria, Carnegie et al found that, in some cases, aid distribution improved how civilians thought rebels were running things significantly. 

The catch, Carnegie et al. discovered, is that in order for a rebel group to synthesize external aid into legitimacy, the rebels themselves had to come from the people they were trying to govern. In communities controlled by locally-grown rebels like the Syrian al-Qaeda affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra, aid to civilians delivered by the United States’ Office of Transition Initiatives increased civilian approval of how local governing councils operated. In communities under foreign rebels — in this case, ISIS — the effect was completely different. Each dollar of assistance added in an ISIS-held area actually reduced civilian support for local councils in that area.

Drawing from interviews with civilians, Carnegie et al. theorized that the source of the discrepancy comes from the comparative “embeddedness” of the two kinds of groups. Local rebels are better able to build legitimacy with outside resources because their local knowledge and accountability to the community allows them to deploy those resources in ways that maximize political effect. Conversely, foreign rebels, who lack strong relationships with the local community, tend to distribute aid in ways that only underscores the disconnect between the rebels and the community. One Raqqa resident described ISIS attempts at governance  by pointing out that “ISIS members refuse to give people money unless they have some connection with ISIS.” Needless to say, those connections were not enough to build broad-based support for ISIS in Raqqa.

Lydia Emmanouilidou spoke to Feroza Aziz, the creator of a viral TikTok raising awareness about the Chinese government’s repression of Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang province. TikTok, a Chinese company, suspended Aziz’s account shortly after she posted the video, but has since reinstated her and denied that her suspension was intended as censorship. Aziz remains skeptical, calling TikTok’s explanation “very suspicious and doubtful.”

Mark Hannah discussed the findings of a survey he ran to study how Americans view American foreign policy. Overall, the survey results suggest that Americans favor scaling back American military adventurism, with many more respondents listing “avoiding unnecessary interventions” than “promoting … democracy around the world” as foreign policy priorities. As Hannah pointed out, that preference is at odds with the narrative common among foreign policy professionals that there is a consensus in favor of democracy promotion.

Patrick Winn interviewed experts on Chinese politics to get a sense of how the Chinese government views ongoing impeachment proceedings against US President Donald Trump. In public, the Chinese Communist Party is using impeachment as a way to contrast the stability of the Chinese political system with the factionalism of multiparty democracy. In private though, experts speculated, Chinese leaders are likely rooting for Trump to survive impeachment, as his lack of popularity worldwide serves Chinese interests.

It’s hard to imagine that the five tablespoons of black pepper in this mammoth Thanksgiving recipe would change the taste much one way or another.

Never underestimate what you can learn with open-source intelligence.

One cool fact about narwhal tusk weaponry: A chef in London fought back against a knife-wielding attacker on London Bridge last week with a five-foot narwhal tusk he grabbed from the wall of his restaurant. More cool facts about narwhal tusk weaponry can be found here.

On one hand, the producers at MSNBC should really know better. On the other hand, it was pretty lazy for the 2019 writers room to start recycling character names.